Wireless technology for computing systems is constantly changing and evolving. New wireless protocols are released each year directed to solving new problems or more efficiently solving old problems. As new technologies are released implementing new protocols, demand grows for computing devices that support more and more protocols.
Devices capable of communicating using one or more wireless technologies are referred to as radios. In early radio implementations, support for more protocols required more hardware to support those protocols since each protocol depended on specific hardware—e.g., amplifiers, antennas, filters, etc.—for support. More hardware in turn required more space and more power, and possibly even more hardware to deal with signal interference between components.
Efficiency considerations have led to the development of new radio implementations that move some functions from being performed in hardware to being performed in software. These new implementations are known as software defined radio (SDR). In some cases, multiple wireless communication protocols can be supported by one set of hardware.